Since 2/1/13 (Slate), AMZN's up 205%. 205% in 4 years to almost this day!!!!!
His thesis that AMZN's an investor funded charity has been blown up via the gains accrued by investors. Despite being wrong, I admire his analysis as insightful and true to value investing principles.
In the '15 article, he changed his thesis to account for AWS' unexpected rise and earnings contributions and said his thesis fails if AMZN doesn't run out of profitable investment ops. I submit that's the key change. Despite being overall bearish, that's walking it back quite a bit.
FWIW, since 12/9/15 (Vox), AMZN's up 26%.
Re:Amazon's Antitrust Paradox
by aptwebapps on Saturday February 04, 2017 @03:59AM
(#13566309)
I was going by memory and your '15 link, so I could well be mistaken. I remembered the general tenor as "What's up with this?" rather than "It will never work."
Amazon has not, historically, been a profitable company because Amazon's leaders don't want it to be a profitable company. In the future it will continue to not be profitable for the exact same reason. In the past, Amazon has managed to turn a profit when it's forced to by skepticism from Wall Street, which suggests that non-profitability is a choice.
Indeed, it's a choice that CEO Jeff Bezos has explained to the public in response to a joke I once made about the company's unprofitability:
and
Fundamentally, Amazon will only start booking large consistent profits when the company's leaders run out of new ideas to invest in. Right now they are not out of ideas, as you can easily tell from the wide range of businesses they are halfway into.